When in Rome, the young visual collective Crudo Volta dreams of Lagos, Cotonou, and Maputo. The name Crudo Volta translates from the Italian as “a time for rawness”—something jagged and pure. Its members make high-energy, high-gloss documentary films that bridge Africa and the African diaspora. But despite its flagship medium, Crudo Volta is, at its core, all about sound.
In 2016, the group made Woza Taxi, a short movie about gqom, a nocturnal house genre birthed in Durban, South Africa. Next came Yenkyi Taxi, which followed Brendan “Hagan” Opoku-Ware, a London-based producer, through Accra, Ghana, where his family is originally from. And earlier this year, Crudo Volta debuted “Taxi Waves,” an Italian streaming series on youth music scenes in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Nigeria. Now, the collective has spun off a record label that draws on its sonic archive and transnational ties.
That label, Python Syndicate, is a two-man joint, run by Mike Calandra Achode, a Beninese-Italian graphic designer and founding member of Crudo Volta, and Nan Kolè, a DJ and gqom evangelist. Their first release is Taxi Sampler 01: Rhythms & Vibes from the Spirit of Young Africa, a two-LP set featuring “the sonic and cultural landscape” of the continent’s contemporary underground, replete with a 26-page photo booklet.
The album is a musical skinny dip into a warm lagoon—which is to say, no previous experience with African club music necessary. Achode and Kolè have chosen a mix of previously unreleased tracks and tunes familiar to Afrophilic cosmopolitan DJs—by artists including Young John, Hagan, Gafacci, Sess the Problem, Ellputo, and TLC FAM. Many of the songs are fun and danceable; others hit a hypnotic groove and get stuck, looping into boredom.
Every few tracks on the LP version, there’s also a short “skit”—an interview with a music-maker—reminiscent of both ethnographic field recordings and the palate-cleansing entr’actes on rap and R&B albums. In one, Ghanaian producer Gafacci recalls his father telling him, “Hey, you have to have African elements in your songs.” (This interview appears in Yenkyi Taxi.) Another skit proceeds in an unidentified language, conveying an impression of unmediated foreignness. In their signaling of authenticity, these snippets can feel heavy-handed, but it’s nice to put a lilting voice and laugh to a name.
The strongest tracks on Taxi Sampler 01 come from two better-known artists, Rvdical the Kid and Ethiopian Records. In “Tigist,” the Addis Ababa-born Ethiopian Records opens with dueling synth swirls and a heaving drone, then builds with organic complements: palmed drums and a reedy flute. Rvdical the Kid, a DJ and producer who splits his time between the U.S. and West Africa, blends soul and funk vocals, call-and-response shouts, and an insistent, trap-like bass in “Yama Kegule” and “Free Spirit.” Both artists work up a density in their tunes, as though they’ve swaddled the underlying beat, then peeled and unpeeled the layers, to the listener’s surprise. All this adding and subtracting moves their music along, toward peaks and troughs and suspenseful transitions. Other, lesser tunes on the album are static by comparison, building only in terms of decibels, not emotion.
It might be said that electronic music should move with the imagined velocity, mystery, and danger of a taxi, the preferred motif of Crudo Volta and Python Syndicate. On countless productions of World Music 2.0—the term for post-colonial, post-ethnographic global sounds—the taxi has symbolized movement through unfamiliar territory. For listeners new to gqom, Afrobass, and Ethiopiyawi Electronic, that’s what Taxi Sampler 01 does best.
